


Second Sight

by 221b_hound



Series: Blood Brothers [8]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood, Child Death, Clues, Gen, Gruesome Crime Scene, Precognition, Vampire John, epic best friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 08:16:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sally Donovan describes the crime scene to John in accurate detail: the twelve year old boy with his throat slashed in the front hall; the father with multiple stab wounds in the back yard; the mother's blood soaked into her daughter's bedding. The only thing is - Donovan hasn't actually been to the crime scene yet. And she hasn't yet accounted for the missing daughter. Will Sherlock and John be able to help Sally find the missing child before the child dies? And what is John to make of Sally's ominous dream about him and Sherlock?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Sight

John received Sherlock’s text message as he was seeing his last patient for the day.

_84 Barkley Close, Sutton. Make sure you’ve eaten. SH_

Another blood-coated crime scene, then. John had been careful to maintain his supplies of pig’s blood at home since Grimshaw’s murder. John never wanted to experience another thirst like that. Not ever. He took other precautions too, and once a week took extra blood for tests from patients. He had taken an extra vial of blood from Mr Paneet today (and the mouthful confirmed his suspicions, that Mr Paneet needed a referral to a liver specialist. Best wait for the actual report to do that, though: a few days’ delay wouldn't be harmful.)

Sherlock would have willingly provided the blood of course, but John did not like to take advantage of his friend that way. Sherlock was too important to become essentially a snack dispenser to a vampire.

He took his hurried leave from the clinic and flagged a cab. When the peak hour congestion got too much, he paid and dashed out into the streets. It was mostly faster when he ran, anyway.

John slowed his pace as he approached the address Sherlock had sent him, and lifted his head to sniff the air. He could smell the blood already. It was hard to discern other scents from this distance. He cocked his head to listen instead. There. Sherlock’s unmistakable baritone rumble, giving some uniformed copper out the front a hard time. Lestrade’s smooth voice, demanding to know where the hell Donovan was, and faintly, from inside, Anderson’s tenor complaining about Sherlock being on the scene.

And the sound of someone crying, not inside the house, but…

Frowning, John jogged to a stop, listened again, and then carefully stepped down the service alley a few streets down from the house in question.

Sergeant Sally Donovan was crouched against the wall, hands clutched in her hair, hiding her face. Every now and then, she emitted a sharp sob. She was clearly trying her hardest not to cry and failing terribly.

John debated simply stepping quietly away, but she looked up at him then.

“Have you seen it?” she asked. Her voice shook.

“Only just arrived.”

She nodded and hid her face against her knees. Now that he was closer, John could hear her teeth chattering.

“Sergeant Donovan…”

“Four dead,” she said in a voice that was almost a moan. “Mother. Father. Son. Daughter. Mum, Dad and the boy have their throats slashed. The son will be in the front hall. He tried to run. He was only twelve. The father will be in the back yard. There’ll be fourteen stab wounds. The killer really, really hated him.” Her next breath juddered in; hissed out. "The mother will be upstairs in the daughter's bedroom. The blood will have soaked into the duvet. A Wonder Woman duvet. It's pooling on the floor against the doll’s house. A big plush teddy bear is soaking it up. So much blood, John. The smell of it. _The smell of it."_

John knew exactly what she meant. 

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she said, and wept.

“Sally?”

She looked up at him again. “I haven’t actually been to the scene yet. But I know what’s there,” she confessed.

Many years ago, John Watson would have assumed fatigue or drugs or some other psychosis. That was before Afghanistan and Sebastian Moran, and waking up dead. John knew there were things besides humans in the world now. He wondered which monster Sally Donovan would turn out to be, and why he’d never noticed before.

“I dream things,” she said, “And they come true.”

 _Oh. That kind of monster, then_.

“You don’t make them happen,” he said, as kindly as he could.

“How do you know?”

_Because I met a Dreamer once before._

“How could you possibly cause them with a dream?”

“I couldn’t,” she decided, “But I can’t stop it either. I don’t know why I see these things if I can’t stop them.”

“Things don’t always make sense. They’re not always for a reason.”

“That. Doesn’t. Help.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She glared at him then, but there was as much fear as ferocity in the look. “He’s going to hurt you, John. Kill you. Sherlock Holmes.”

 _Ah_. “No he won’t.”

“It’s what I see.”

And again, _ah._

“When I look at you,” she continued, “All I see is a dead man. Which is horrible, I know. I’m sorry. But when I look at you, you look dead to me. I can’t see what you look like alive any more. Too pale. Like you don’t breathe. Just a trick of the brain, I know. This crazy brain.” She tapped her temple with her forefinger and tried to look like it was a joke, and looked like she was crumbling to pieces instead.

John wondered what the hell he was supposed to say next, but Sally hadn’t finished. The anger rose up over her fear.

“I keep _telling_ you. I keep telling _everyone_. One day there’s going to be a body, and Sherlock Holmes will be the one who put it there. I saw it, John. _I saw it_.”

“My body?”

“Yes. No. Yes. I don't know. But...But yours is there. There’s a body, covered in blood, and you’re next to it, not a mark on you. Sitting there. Not breathing. Pale as death. No pulse. You’re next to the body Sherlock Holmes killed and you’re dead, with an expression on your face like you’ve been betrayed, or like your best friend just died, because you know. You _know_. He’s going to be the death of you John. Get out while you can. Please. Please.”

The rage was gone again, leaving only the despair.

“I know _I’m_ the Freak, I _know_ it, but I’ve _seen_ this. I dreamed that body two years ago and I know Sherlock has something to do with it. I’ve never trusted him, or what he does. He claims it’s all science, but if that’s true, what does that make me? I’m a freak too, so I know what he is. I know it. He pretends it’s science, but it _couldn’t_ be. He sees things too, and he pretends, and he’s going to turn into a killer. When you arrived on the scene with him that night, I realised I’d dreamed of you, and where. And now when I have that dream, I know what’s coming and I can’t…I can’t _stop_ it.”

John remained steady in the face of her certainty. After all, he was the one who knew he was already dead. "I believe you, all right. I believe you see what you see.”

The look she gave him was sceptical.

“I’ve seen a lot of the world, Sally,” said John, “I’ve seen a lot of strange things; things that can’t easily be explained by science, if they can be explained at all.” _Done quite a few by now too_. “One guy I served with in Afghanistan used to dream things exactly three days before any IED incident. So I believe you when you say you’re having precognitive dreams. But it’s still a dream, open to interpretation. You’re not interpreting  it correctly. You can’t be. Sherlock won’t kill me. He can’t kill me."

“Don’t be stupid. You’re flesh and blood like anyone. Being a soldier won’t help you. Thinking you’re his friend won’t save you.”

 _Being dead already might_. But he didn't say anything about that part. “Fine. All right. I’ll… keep it in mind. I’ll find out what it means. But it doesn’t mean what you think it does. It can’t.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t save John Watson, she obviously thought, any more than she could save the dead family inside the house three doors down. Slowly, like every bone ached, she stood up and scrubbed her face with her hands until the tears and despair were gone, and only the distrust and rage were left.

"I have to go.  The DI is looking for me."

John stepped back to give her space. "What about the daughter?"

"What?"

"The daughter. You described everyone else. Where's the daughter?"

Sally scowled. "Leave it."

"Not in her room?"

"No," Sally snapped, "She's not in her room. She's in the dark. Surrounded by blood and eyes. And she's dead. Like the rest of them. I'm going to get there too late."

At John's searching look, her scowl twisted into an expression that betrayed her despair again. " _That's what I see_. Eyes and red and darkness and she stops breathing. She's five years old and she stops breathing before I find her."

John met her despair with a challenge. "Let's go find her alive, then. Prove your dream a liar."

“They haven't lied before."

"They haven't met me before."

That made her laugh, a harsh, dry bark of a laugh. Then she clenched her jaw, drew herself up tall, and walked into her nightmare.

Sherlock and Lestrade started in on the pair of them immediately with _Where the hell have you been?_ in stereo, but at John’s look, Sherlock dropped the irritation and studied them both.

“Sorry sir,” said sergeant Donovan tersely, “I was held up and then I bumped into Dr Watson. Any developments?”

“The _Great Detective_ is obsessed with a ladder,” said Anderson snidely from where he stood beside the body of a young boy in the hallway. The child’s throat had been slashed. John watched as Sally flinched, then squared her shoulders and looked over the scene.

Sherlock snorted derisively. “A ladder that was obviously used indoors is lying across the back yard, also obviously dropped from a height.”

“The killer must have tried to use it as an avenue of escape,” said Anderson dismissively.

“The ladder isn’t long enough to reach the first storey,” retorted Sherlock, “Which is apparent to the meanest intelligence, excepting yours.”

“I said _tried_.”

“Who in their right mind would even attempt to use a ladder that was so clearly too short to reach the ground?”

“The killer’s not in his right mind, I’d have thought that was clear even to the great Sherlock Holmes. Look what he did to this poor kid.”

Sherlock’s next reply was quelled by Lestrade. “If the two of you could save your pissing contest for later, we have a killer to catch.”

Sherlock snapped his coat close to his body and walked past the dead boy.

“Sherlock…?”

“I’ve seen all I need to see here.”

John followed Sherlock through to the back yard where a middle aged man lay in a pool of coagulating blood from multiple stab wounds. Just as Sally had predicted.

“The mother’s upstairs?” he asked.

Sherlock gave him a piercing look. “Yes.”

“The daughter?”

“Have your powers of observation improved suddenly?” Sherlock asked, “Or is this a vampire thing?”

“Shh,” hissed John, though Sherlock had spoken too quietly to be overheard by the Yarders, “And it’s… something else. I’ll explain in a while. But do you have any idea about the daughter?”

“None. Anderson and Lestrade think she’s been taken.”

“And you?”

“It’s possible.” He sounded like it was the remotest of contingencies.

John looked over his shoulder at Sally, who was going up the stairs to the second level. She looked like she was walking to her own execution.

“What would you say to the idea,” said John, “That the daughter is…” He thought how best to express it, and decided on Sally’s own words. “Someplace dark. Surrounded by red, and eyes. Might be blood. Take it that she’s still breathing, but not for much longer.”

Sherlock frowned at him. “John, where is this information coming from?”

“I’ll tell you later,” said John, “If it works.”

Sherlock frowned. He looked past the body and at the ladder lying dented in the tiny yard. He looked up at the first storey window that overlooked the yard. Squinted at it, at the shapes dangling against the glass from the inside.

“Come on.”

Sherlock turned and raced up the stairs, John on his heels.

Upstairs was a short corridor leading to three bedrooms. The master bedroom, the boy’s room at the front of the house, and the girl’s bedroom at the back.

Lestrade and Donovan were in the back room, with Anderson, examining the body of the dead woman. Her throat was slashed, the blood soaked into the bedclothes. _Wonder Woman duvet._ It pooled onto the floor and the thick mess of it spread around the doll’s house and into the feet of the teddy bear _. Big plush teddy bear._

The smell of it, as Sally had told him, was thick. John was glad he’d eaten before coming. It made his teeth itch.

Sally Donovan was practically quivering with rage, her teeth clenched. John could hear them grinding.

Sherlock strode past it all to examine the window. He pulled out his lens and studied the sill, the handles, the tangled teddy-bear mobile that dangled from the curtain rod. He frowned. Turned. Looked at the ceiling. Looked around the room. Scowled. “Not here.”

“What?” Lestrade was puzzled but alert.

Sherlock picked his way past them to look in the wardrobe but seemed unsurprised to find it yielded little of interest.

“Any clues here?” Sally demanded, tone brittle.

“Several,” Sherlock said, “But only three relate to the question at hand.”

“Which is?” she snapped.

“Where is the daughter?”

“Penny,” said Sally tightly, “Her name is Penny Donal.”

Sherlock’s gaze raked over her, came to rest on John with a faint sense of a question, then continued back into the hallway. “It still will be, in the present tense, if we find her alive.”

Sherlock stepped into the hall and looked up at the high ceiling. “John!”

With a look at Sally that tried to be reassuring, John joined Sherlock outside the horror-steeped bedroom.

Sherlock nodded at the hatch in the ceiling, the kind that usually led to an attic. It was too high to be reached under normal circumstances. As John watched, Sherlock strode two steps into the hall, examined the wall beside the stair and nodded.

“Think you can get up there?”

John studied it, and wondered about getting up there with all these people watching. He cocked his head. Listened.

A rustling sound. Maybe rats.

Maybe not.

To hell with witnesses. Whatever else was up there, darkness was certainly part of it. From a standing start, John leapt up and knocked the hatch open, hanging onto the edge with his fingers. He began to pull himself up into the space. It was an impressive physical feat to anyone watching, if they didn’t know he was a vampire.

“The ladder used to rest here,” Sherlock explained as Lestrade, Donovan and Anderson came out to join them, “Positioned to easily use it to get up there.” He looked up as John leaned down to offer his hand. With his easy, unnatural strength, he pulled Sherlock up into the darkness.

Then John leaned down and offered his hand to Sally Donovan. Anderson began to protest, but she looked at John, not quite daring to hope, and he pulled her up into the dark and the dust as well.

“What are we looking for?” asked John, releasing Sally’s hand. He was trying to listen, but there were too many sounds – Anderson’s complaints in the hall, and Lestrade telling him to shut up. All those beating hearts, all those heavy breaths. A muddle.

“I’m not sure,” responded Sherlock, “Eyes you said. Eyes and red. Eyes….” Sherlock turned and saw Sally Donovan staring at him. Rather than explain, he frowned and turned his back on her. Then, unexpectedly, he turned back. “You gave that description to John,” he announced rather than asked, “What did you mean by ‘red’?”

“Blood,” she said.

“No,” he said, “You’d have said blood if that’s what you meant. It’s what it makes you think of. What do you mean?” Sherlock had retrieved a small torch and was flicking it around the attic space, which was full of junk. Boxes and old furniture, bags of clothes, suitcases, a seamstress’s model, an old exercise bike.

“I said ‘blood’.” Sally said, her voice hard.

“But then you said ‘red’,” John replied, “Red and eyes.” He couldn’t smell blood up here. He was listening for breathing, for heartbeats. There were many small, rapid heartbeats further up in the roof. Rats, probably. In this room it was harder to hear. Sherlock’s, yes. Sally’s. Something else, maybe. Muffled. Too fast.

Sally scowled.

“Hurry,” John said, “We’re running out of time.”

“The red is… soft,” Sally bit out, “Soft and silky, it… flows. And it’s very, very red. Scarlet. ”

“Blood isn’t soft and silky,” scoffed Sherlock, “It’s sticky, especially when it’s coagulating. It’s not quite scarlet either. Bright red when oxygenated, dark red, more carmine, without oxygen. What kind of red?”

“Bright,” said Sally, despite her reservations, “Bright red and silky.”

“And flowing, yes,” Sherlock sounded more speculative than derisive now. “We’re looking for some kind of box, John. A trunk perhaps. Large enough for a child to fit into.”

John could hear it now, separated from Sherlock’s heartbeat and Sally’s own rapidly thumping pulse. The breaths were coming more shortly, and he could see a trunk in the darkness, behind a pile of suitcases.

“Ah, here!” Sherlock announced just as John started towards the trunk, “You can see in the dust where everything’s been moved. Come on!”

The two of them were throwing things out of the way, and Sally held her breath, not answering the demands from below to know what the hell was going on. Instead, she crowded up behind the two men as they got to the huge wooden trunk, stained and dented, old and heavy as it was.

From the seam of it, where the lid met the body, a scrap of scarlet cloth drooped down the wood.

The lid of the trunk was heavy. John threw it open with ease.

Inside, a pale little face pointed up at them, surrounded by abandoned soft toys and old clothes for dress-ups, including a scarlet ballgown. She looked like a painting of the death of innocence.

Sally’s sharp cry was desolate as Sherlock reached in and pulled the child out. She was tiny in his arms as he laid her on the floor.

“She still has a pulse,” John declared, ensuring the girl was on her back, he airways clear. He knelt at her head and tilted her chin. He pinched her nose, took a breath and bent to breathe the air he didn’t need into the lungs that starved.

Sally stumbled back, a fist shoved in her mouth to stop her own cries, and was startled to find Sherlock had seized her hand. He squeezed it, but his eyes were on John.

John breathed into her lungs a second time, a third, a fourth, and on the fifth, there was a cough. A cry. John pressed fingers to the child’s throat, even though he already knew her pulse was getting stronger.

Sally saw as the little girl opened her eyes, looked at John, then opened in terror.

“It’s okay honey,” said Sally, crawling forward to her, “Penny. Sweetheart, it’s okay.”

Penny’s frightened gaze went to Sally and in the next moment, the five year old had lunged away from John and fell into Sally’s arms.

John sat back on his haunches and gave Sherlock a rueful smile. Sherlock nodded then leaned over to shout at those below: “We’ve got the girl.”

Sherlock then turned to regard Sally with baffled concern. Sally, who had scooped the crying child into her arms, was rocking her back and forth, saying, over and over, “You’re all right. You’re all right, Penny. We found you in time. We found you. I found you.” The two of them, woman and child, cried through the ending of their terror together.

*

Sherlock, coat pulled tight around himself, stood in the front yard explaining his reasoning to Lestrade. “The ladder in the hall had been there a long time, according to the marks against the paint. Clearly, the family used it to get into the attic for storage and retrieval. The fact that the ladder was in the back yard indicated that somebody didn’t want the attic accessed. The window in Penny’s room had been opened, the ladder thrown out, and then closed again, scraping paint from the sill and tangling the mobile, so whoever had done it was trying to ensure that the lack of access was more than temporary. The location of the Mrs Donal’s body was highly indicative that she was the one who was taking precautions. If the son was the first to die, her first instinct after that would be to protect her daughter.” He frowned. “She ran up the stairs, got her daughter to hide in the old toy trunk, came down, closed the ceiling hatch and threw the ladder outside. That’s where the killer caught up with her.”

Anderson steadfastly refused to be impressed. “We still have to catch the killer,” he pointed out.

“He won’t be hard to find. The husband’s partner in drug crime, if the white powder in the garage and the fifty bags of sugar for a family with two diabetics is anything to go by. My money’s on Pavel Dorcas.”

“He’s been trying to break in on supply in this area,” agreed Lestrade.

“And he’s hip deep in debt to the Russian mafia,” said Sherlock, “Which may explain his ferocity. A desperate man, especially if Donal was double dealing with him . If you don’t reach Dorcas soon, I imagine you’ll find him in literal pieces. The Russian mafia is nothing if not direct.”

A phone call distracted Lestrade’s attention. John stepped up shoulder-to-shoulder with Sherlock.

“Red and eyes?” he asked.

“Given what I was beginning to suspect about the ladder, it struck me that the daughter might be hiding. The suggestion of eyes immediately suggested surveillance, but when I got to Penny’s room and saw all the toys, a toy box of dolls and plush toys was the next connection I could think of. If the box wasn’t in her room, the ladder made more sense: storage in the attic.”

“Mrs Donal can’t have meant to seal her daughter in the box.”

“Mrs Donal was clever, but she didn’t have much time. Perhaps she thought she’d be able to return to retrieve Penny. Perhaps she didn’t realise the lid was too heavy for Penny to move it herself.” Sherlock shrugged. “I can deduce facts; I can’t read minds.” Sherlock glanced sideways to consider Sally Donovan, dry eyed and business-as-usual as she spoke to neighbours. “I am assuming that this is something else I need to assimilate into my worldview, besides vampires and fox spirits.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Does she know about you?”

“Not… really. She’s got other issues with me.”

Sherlock arched an eyebrow.

John grimaced. “She thinks she perceives me as dead because she’s seen me dead in a dream.”

“Ah.”

“No need to sound like that. She dreamed this, after all. In vivid detail.”

“Not vivid enough.”

“No.” John frowned. “She has a dream, apparently, that you kill me. Had it before you and I even met.”

Sherlock snorted. “Ridiculous.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I could no more kill you than kill myself.”

“You could. One well-aimed stake…”

“You mistake me,” said Sherlock. “Perhaps ‘would’ rather than ‘could’.”

John grinned at him. “I know.” He shoved Sherlock gently in the shoulder with his own, a friendly substitute for a public hug. “Hang on. Be right back.”

John walked over to Sally as she checked her notes and began to walk to another neighbour’s house. There was a look to her, John thought, that was lighter than he’d seen before.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she responded. She looked tired, certainly, but less burdened as well. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I told you,” he said, “Those dreams don’t tell the whole story.”

“Maybe not.” Sally grimaced. “I like to think not. I joined the force because of those dreams, you know. Thinking I could make a difference. I like to think… maybe I _can_ make a difference after all.”

“I’m sure you can – and that you already have. You weren’t wrong in what you saw, after all, though you weren’t right either.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. But be careful.” Sally’s gaze rose over John’s shoulder, to Sherlock waiting for him at the end of the crime scene tape.

“I don’t need to be careful of Sherlock,” said John, “But I will be careful, of whatever’s coming.”

Sally turned her thoughtful gaze on him, next. “What are you, John Watson?”

John laughed. “Just a bloke.”

“You’re not _just_ anything.”

“I really am.”

“You’re not, any more than _he_ is.”

“He’s a genius,” John said, “Really. He doesn’t dream this stuff. He just sees it.”

“So I’m the only freak?” Her tone was bitter.

“You’re not the only one who has a gift,” John corrected her, “But Sherlock’s isn’t supernatural.”

“And you’re ‘just a bloke’.”

“Yep.”

“My arse.”

“Whatever you like, Sally. But between us, we found Penny alive, and we proved your dreams aren’t inevitable. That’s a good day’s work, by my reckoning.”

Sally closed her eyes. She opened them, and nodded, and smiled, a genuine, warm smile. “By mine too.”

John left her to her interviews. He met Sherlock as the latter strode out into the street and they fell into step together.

“I wonder what it is that she’s really seeing,” said Sherlock quietly.

“A blood-soaked body on the street, and me next to it, looking dead and unhappy.”

“Not Moriarty, then.” Sherlock frowned. “You wouldn’t be unhappy about that. We’ll have to get details.”

“Tomorrow,” said John.

“All right,” agreed Sherlock, “But soon.”


End file.
